“You have lost a lot of blood in the time I’ve been here. As long as you know the barriers around Prayer will hold, then you must take the time to eat and restore your strength.” He returned to the storeroom and came back a minute later with his arms filled with roots and her ration stores. “I will not tell you my plan otherwise.”
He stood there, seemingly waiting for her response, so she nodded. He went back to preparing a meal.
“I don’t know how much longer the barrier will hold,” she said.
“You cannot strengthen it?”
“No…”
He stirred the ingredients into a bowl, adding in a jug of fresh water. “Why?”
“I did not put it there to begin with.”
His eyes shot back to hers, and she moved her legs under her.
“Tell me now, Calavia,” he ordered, his voice grave. “I will not ask for answers and be given none again. We are past secrets between us. I will not forgive your lies again.”
It was hard for her to even fathom the idea of making herself any more vulnerable than she already was, but she knew he was right. They had to be past it, and he had proven himself to her.He stayed.
She bit down on her tongue. Despite all the promises she made to her mother to keep herself safe at any cost, to retain her knowledge in her throat and not share it with the world, Calavia knew it couldn’t be her burden any longer. Not since the minotaurs arrived and took over the mountains close to her own land, and not since she’d chosen to save Aldora and help the human and her minotaur escape.
Calavia thought about what she would do if she could go back in time. Would she have still helped the human female out, knowing all she did now? Not once had she ever thought there could be more than her quiet existence, not until she saw what Aldora and Vedikus had. Nor in the many years alone prior, had she thought there would be kindness outside of her small world.
Her mother convinced her otherwise.
She looked at Astegur and knew she would divulge everything.
Calavia clenched her toes, deciding, knowing there was nothing left to lose. “I told you before that Prayer fell the night my mother conceived me. She was taken by force by a sun priest in the hours leading up to the town’s fall. The mist was clouding our village and the capital was delivering sacrifices to keep it at bay, but my mother was a priestess who had hidden her magic, and when the mists worsened…she tried to stop it. The priest caught her.”
“Your father?”
“My father.” She waved her hand at the walls around her. “He ruled Prayer. According to my mother, this was once a deeply religious place, and people would travel far to study here and become priests and priestesses themselves in order to serve the sun. There was once a monastery high up in the mountains devoted to the most religious patrons, but Prayer was the town that supported it. The capital lost the mountains and did not want to lose Prayer, as well.”
Astegur stopped stirring and turned to face her. “I’ve been there.”
“Yes,” she said. “I know. There’s not much to do here but spy through my wax.”
“Have you seen me in it?”
“It’s hard to say. You saw the centaurs before, but do you remember their faces, the details? Everything the wax shows is out of context… I can’t assume to know what is actually happening, or who I’m actually seeing.” She remembered back to the day she summoned him. “I did not recognize you when you first stood before me.”
“In the flames?”
“And the smoke.”
“And the barrier that protects this place?” he asked.
Calavia stilled, but forced herself to relax as she laid her hands before her, palms up for Astegur to see. “My mother fought and cursed my father. She prayed, bloodied and ruined, to the sun for help. She would not tell me what happened, but I know now that it wasn’t the sun that answered her prayers, but the mist. It flooded the town, and she got her wish, but—”
“Everything comes with a sacrifice.”
“Yes.”
“So, your mother placed the barrier?”
“I don’t know, not really. In the hours that Prayer was enveloped, most of the survivors tried to flee, including my father, before the labyrinth wall had time to erect itself deeper into Savadon. No one knew if they made it. They never came back. But not everyone was able to flee. My mother was too hurt to try, and the prisoners from the capital were left behind, stuck behind bars. The elderly were too weak. It was chaos. The people gathered here in the temple to fight off the monsters that waited for the wall to shift so they could enter. But they never came, and Prayer remained untouched, even after the wall moved inward.” Calavia picked at her dress. She peered back up at Astegur and he stared at her with a strange expression, one she was sure was disbelief.
“A dark spot in a dark world,” he murmured. “One that shouldn’t even exist anymore.”
